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A cookie crumb trail through the kanji.

Remembering the Kanji vol.2 Anki Deck

Welcome to the home page for the Anki deck for Dr. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji vol. 2. You can download the deck here.

Up till now, RTK2 has always been the poor cousin to RTK1 and 3, with most people choosing to ignore it in favour of simply learning readings in context. Learning in context of course works well, but there is a great deal of potential benefit to following the order Dr. Heisig presents in this volume; it’s still mostly brute force memory, but as much aid as can be given is given here. However, there has not been a convenient way to review RTK2 in an SRS system. It is my hope that this deck will be that way.

This deck is shared with permission of Dr. Heisig. Signal primitives are not included, due to copyright restrictions. It’s a little unfortunate, but since it is assumed that you will be using this deck with the book, you will have the primitives at hand to add to the cards yourself. Most of these are Japanese characters on their own. Some are not Japanese, but are Chinese. Some are neither, but still recognizable – there are characters for radicals, for example. Some, you will have to mark as “left side of such a character” or similar because no such character exists on its own. I strongly encourage you to add these to your cards, because as much logic as there is in kanji readings resides mostly in these signal primitives.

The cards for frames that do not have signal primitives all have the study character highlighted in red. Those that do have signal primitives have the character in red for the primary reading for the given primitive, and the following readings in order are: green; purple; orange; blue; yellow; brown; and grey for anything past brown (yes, some have that many!). Frames that have more than one reading (i.e. where each character of a compound is a study character) are divided into two or occasionally more cards, e.g. 1124a and 1124b.

The default font on the cards is MS Mincho. This will of course work wherever you have that font installed, which will primarily be Windows computers. On a Mac, Hiragino Mincho Pro is recommended. Of course you can use whichever you find easiest to read, but personally the more traditional-looking serif fonts have always been the ones I’ve gotten along with best.

Tags are set according to chapter. If you’re ambitious you can tackle the whole deck at once; but it might be better to suspend the later chapters “potpourri” and “supplementary” for a while, to solidify your knowledge of the most common readings first. There are also some cards tagged “rare” and “uncommon” which it might not hurt to suspend as well.

I have not set the cards to require typed input for the answer, but if you prefer to type in your answers you can use the “ReadingOnly” field for that.

In a few cases the keywords are different from what Dr. Heisig gives. Usually this is to avoid confusion where a small っ appears; either かつ or かく can lead to the same reading, for example. Very rarely it is because the given keyword was so rare that it wasn’t even found in the dictionaries I use.

Here’s a sample view, on Anki Mobile. The desktop view is much the same.

Very handy, but I’ve a copy of the 4th edition of RTK 2, and I’ve been noticing quite a number of discrepancies. Typical authors, and their new edition meddling 🙂
Still, “fixing” an existing deck is less work than creating one from scratch.

WOW, this is like a godsebnd, im just finished book one , and have been doing alot of readign so already am starting to get to grips with readings, but , like hesiig i love to berak things down into really small chunks and master them first, this for me is amazing, just so much work put into this unique deck, P.S is this only the onyomi or does it includet he kun yomi too?

Hello, your link to the deck doesn’t seem to work anymore? I was just wondering if there was a way to get the file somehow? I want to start RTK2, but i don’t really understand the formatting for this book’s cards. Thanks!

Thanks for your message. The issue is that I no longer use Anki and Ankiweb periodically deletes inactive accounts, so any shared decks on those accounts also get deleted, or at least that’s what seems to have happened. I have now changed the link for the download.